Slow reading here. Even slower than usual. I'd picked up a couple of of books I'd been given as presents, and neither really grabbed me. In fact the first, The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, I didn't finish. It's a strange, partly fictionalised travelogue on his journeys around Australia and encounters with Aboriginal people. The stuff on Aboriginal culture and myths was fascinating, but the rest is blah. I think I'd enjoy a different book on aboriginal culture, about which I know shamefully little.
Next was 8.Warlight by Michael Ondaatje. Just after ww2, Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are left bereft, when their mother moves to Singapore to join their father, who's been there for some time. They're left in the care of a slightly strange and mysterious friend of their mother, whom they nickname The Moth. The Moth introduces them to various other shady associates who despite their dodgy activities generally appear to act benignly towards the children. One day, they discover by chance their mother's travelling trunk and clothing in the basement, it never having been sent ahead to Singapore after all.
The adult Nathaniel reflects on these events, having used his job in the security services to explore the pasts of his mother and her friends and tries to make sense of his adolescence.
This was a funny one. The plot is eventful, but it moved really unevenly, feeling turgid in places, to the point where the lyrical writing couldn't distract me from feeling a bit bored in parts. The characters are so deliberately shrouded in mystery (other than Nathaniel, but he's a seemingly deliberately blank Nick Carraway type narrator) that we don't get much sense for people motivations and reactions to the often shocking events around them. It was fine, a bit odd, but not amazing.